Framescrll › Photo albums
Let it pick the best photos — then make a book of them
Point the app at an album, say how many photos you want, and it reads the album on your phone and picks the best ones. The scoring happens on the device — no photo is uploaded to score it, or ever.
Choosing twelve good photos out of four hundred from a weekend is the slow part of making a carousel, and it's the part that has nothing to do with design. Most of those four hundred are near-duplicates, half-blinks, and the three you took because you weren't sure the first one worked.
What it actually looks at
Each photo gets a score from a few independent signals, and the highest scorers win — with a deliberate spread across the album rather than twelve frames of the same moment:
- Sharpness. A blur measure over the image, so the shot where the camera moved loses to the one where it didn't.
- Exposure. A histogram check that penalises the badly under- and over-exposed — the accidental pocket shot, the one straight into the sun.
- Faces. How many people are in frame, detected on the device.
- Subject. On-device labelling sorts each photo into people, scenery or a mix, so a set doesn't come back as twelve landscapes and no one you know.
- Bursts. Photos taken seconds apart are treated as one moment, and only the best of them can be picked.
Then you see the picks as a grid before anything lands on the canvas, and can drop any you don't want.
Where it runs
Reading a photo album needs the operating system's photo library, which is something only an installed app can ask for. No web browser can enumerate the albums on your phone — there is no such API, on any browser, by design.
The mobile apps are in closed testing rather than on the stores — the changelog tracks where each build has got to.
The choosing itself is no longer app-only. In a browser you hand over a whole folder — or any set of photos — and the same scoring runs there: faces, sharpness and exposure, near-identical bursts folded down to their best shot, people balanced against places. It runs on your own machine, and a folder you have picked before comes back almost at once because the scores are remembered. What still needs the installed app is reading an album as an album, and seeing which photos you marked as favourites — neither of which a browser is allowed to know.
From an album to a printed book
The same engine builds a printed photo book. Open the app, choose Build a photo album, pick the book — hardcover, softcover or layflat, in A4, Letter, A5 and square sizes — say how many photos, and pick an album. The engine chooses the photos, then you choose how they're arranged:
- Let the engine arrange — a chapter per day, each opening full-page with its best shot, pages mixing people and places.
- By date — start to finish.
- Random — shuffle until you like it.
Every page takes its photos at their own proportions — no slicing two portraits into strips — and the book opens in a page-by-page editor: swap any photo for one the engine passed over, drag to reframe it, move it to another page, flip a page's layout, give the cover a title. The book saves itself as you go, so you can put the phone down and pick it up tomorrow.
You are not stuck with what the engine did, either. Any page can be taken off it and arranged by hand — drag, resize, tilt and overlap photos, run one off the edge for a full bleed — or turned into a collage of up to twelve. The binding and size can be changed at any point while you edit, and the pages re-flow to the new shape. Every book you make is kept, so a second one doesn't replace the first, and a book can be saved to a file or sent to another device.
Books start at 24 pages; about 50 photos fills the smallest one nicely, and a 250-photo trip makes a book of about 100 pages. The print files are made at full resolution from your original photos, on the phone.
Ordering is in testing. The checkout and printing pipeline is built and runs against our print partner in test mode; books are not on sale yet. When they are, the price will be shown before you pay and the changelog will say so.
What happens to the photos
For picking and arranging: nothing leaves the device. The blur and exposure maths runs on the pixels locally, and the face and subject detection uses the machine-learning frameworks already built into Android and iOS — neither sends an image anywhere. No upload, no account needed, no copy kept.
The one exception is ordering a printed book, which is opt-in and can't work any other way: when you place an order, the finished print file is uploaded to our storage so the printer can fetch it, and deleted automatically after two weeks. The privacy policy says exactly what is held and for how long.
Using it
- Open Add photos In the app, tap the photo area in the Photos tab, or Add photos on an empty canvas.
- Choose how many you want Pick a number — it can be anything up to fifty — and tap Auto-select.
- Pick the album Your albums are listed with a count each, biggest first. Tap one and it starts reading.
- Check the picks You get a grid of what it chose. Tap any photo to drop it, then add the rest to the canvas — where they arrive already laid out across your slides, ready to arrange.